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Course Management

The OIT currently provides faculty and students several options for communication, academic collaboration, and distribution of course materials.

 

Sakai

Concourse in Sakai logo

Concourse in Sakai is the new online environment designed to facilitate teaching, learning, and assessment at Notre Dame. The use of Concourse in Sakai will enable sharing of knowledge and new models of collaboration within and across disciplines, at Notre Dame and beyond.

Concourse in Sakai is powered by Sakai, an open source collaboration and learning environment. A community of educators and academic institutions has developed Sakai, and more than 350 schools around the world use it to support teaching, learning and scholarly activity both inside and outside the classroom. Concourse in Sakai is simply Sakai configured and customized for use at Notre Dame.

Using Sakai, you can:

  • Publish your syllabi
  • Carry on discussions
  • Provide web links to other resources
  • Distribute files (PowerPoint, PDF, etc.)
  • Create online quizzes
  • Conduct surveys
  • Enable students to submit assignments electronically
  • Manage and post grades


As of Fall 2012, your courses will automatically exist in Sakai, and enrollment in courses is managed automatically by data from the Registrar. This is a new system, so there is a lot to consider when planning for courses. You'll find additional details at sakai.nd.edu.

Concourse

Concourse is Notre Dame's legacy Learning Management System. It is a Web-based tool that can be used to enhance your classes. The instructor provides the content and Concourse provices tools for structure, interactivity, and management. Like Sakai, courses are automatically created in Concourse, and enrollment is automatically managed by data from the Registrar. Concourse will work side-by-side with Sakai during the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 terms, and will be deactivated in June of 2013.

You'll find details and documentation at the Concourse web site. You can also access Concourse from the Academic, or the Student Academic tabs in insideND. 

AFS Courseware

Notre Dame’s Courseware Service provides an alternative means for sharing files between faculty and students. By using the service, instructors can place files into directories and regulate how students access the files.

Features of the Courseware Service include:

  • Placement of files the students in your course can access. Your course folder will store 1GB of files.
  • Access from Windows, Macintosh, or Unix computers.
  • Access restricted to only the faculty member teaching the class, the students officially enrolled in the class, and other Notre Dame faculty, staff, or students the instructor specifically designates.
  • A dropbox where students may submit assignments.

For the most part, these features are all available in Sakai, or even Concourse. However, Courseware is unique among similar solutions in that it allows execution of code from where it is stored. In essence, Courseware is an extension of Notre Dame's AFS cell that is automatically created for each course, but is only given quota by request.

Faculty must request classes and sections be activated and provided with a 1GB quota in order to use the service. Faculty members can submit this request using this online request form. Allow two business days for activation. You will receive a notice when your Courseware space is ready for use.

You can access the Courseware space via WebFile from any web browser with an Internet connection. Alternatively, you can map a drive to Courseware using OpenAFS. You can find instructions for accessing Courseware under AFS at Shared File Space.

Course Mailing Lists (Acadlist)

Electronic mailing lists using LISTSERV® are automatically created for every section of every course at Notre Dame course and course section. Faculty and students can use these mailing lists for discussions, announcements, or other communication.  When a message is posted to a course-related list, the server will check the class roster in real-time to obtain the email addresses of currentlyenrolled students and currently-assigned instructors for the specific course and section, and will then send the message to those addresses.  As soon as the message is distributed, the list of recipient addresses is discarded until the next message is sent and then the process is repeated. As a result, a review of list membership will appear to have no subscribers because of this automated process.  

The mailing list owner can manually add subscribers who are not registered in the course, such as teaching assistants. Additional information and tools for course mailing lists are available here.

All list subscribers receive email that is addressed to the full name of the list, and any subscriber can send messages from their subscribed email address to the entire list.

To determine the mailing list address for your course, using the Kaneb Center Lookup Tool.  All lists utilizing this service will include end in @acadlist.nd.edu.

Additionally, individuals can send messages to members of a course using tools in Sakai or Concourse, or from Online Photo, which is integrated with the AcadList service. Online Photo is a channel available in insideND.